A Flying Dutchman

I rarely am excited and if I do get excited about something, I really feel the compelling need to share the news. The leaked The Hobbit screenshot I shared was a similar case. Here is another one, wait to be mind-blown:

I found this on TechCrunch.

This man has been working for months to achieve this feat with many people jeering on saying that it is all fake. Perhaps I'm simply being gullible but viewing his blog, and a few of his numerous videos, I can assure myself that this amazing human feat is real.

While all the skeptics analyse supposedly suspicious blurs and the absence of tail feathers, I'll look forward to flying in those wings one day. Afterall, it is motor-assisted flying and I do not see how it would be impossible.

CloudFront Invalidator | Wildcards, Resubmission and Credentials Saving

While I had a lot of fun writing my little tool up, it was not too heartening to see that my hours of work almost seemed rather useless.

Today however, I was able to get some motivation thanks to Toby who was the first user to comment on my little tool.

Toby had two suggestions:

• Wildcard path submissions
• Re-submitting previous invalidations

I immediately set off on a mission to get them done.

Blogger | Statistics with AJAX

Blogger has been receiving numerous updates in the past few months, mainly in the new templates called Dynamic Views. I first rejected the option seeing how little customisability it offered, but it seems like my own template is quickly converging towards what Google's Dynamic Views is like in its core: full of JavaScript and depending on the blog's RSS feed.

I started my journey by writing some JavaScript which would let users navigate through pages without having the page refresh fully via some AJAX calls and DOM replacement.

The instant search, with a scrollable results box

Then I designed the top bar that you can see floating above this post and thought how nice it could be if I could have a semi-instant search (Blogger's search is quite slow). I then thought of a way which involved downloading the RSS feed for the blog, and parsing all text in the feed. I wrote an occurrence based points algorithm which allows for basic search.

Back when I was implementing the instant search, I found that with the RSS feed in my hands, I could load full pages as well! This would allow me to flick through pages on my site almost instantly.

This week, I got around to doing that very job, and if you navigate around a little bit, you will see that page loads are almost instant.

There was one problem though, Blogger statistics were not getting updated...

jQuery | Easy TeX Equations

Anyone who has used TEX will agree that no other method of typesetting mathematical equations look nicer. (Thank you Dr. Knuth)

While TEX typesetting can be done easily on your desktop via your favourite program based on the idea, it isn't so on the web.

Of course, there are ways to get this done. You could use the popular jsMath, a JavaScript package which transforms your TEX code into beautiful equations using various fonts and images. You could also use sites such as Code Cogs where you can produce equation images which can then be included into your blog post. These methods however, often require extra processing client-side, and/or more time spent on producing the intended result.

I will talk about a very easy method of doing an equivalent of the above.

Here's the Schrödinger equation for a taster:
i\hbar\frac{\partial\psi}{\partial t} = \frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\nabla^2\psi + V(\mathbf{r})\psi